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Thursday, April 30, 2015

Cardiff and Miller. If you're in Houston you should see it, it's about two blocks from where I live and it's like walking into hyperobject space for sure. Mirrors and frames cause you to see how objects are wrapped in their very own hermeneutical clouds of unknowing. A sound as of two planes of glass sliding over one another forever. An uncertain dimsionality. If Matthew McConaughey had encountered this at the end of Interstellar, he would've been in trouble.

The Wellek Lectures get published by them, and the book got the university press style green light today. Awesome. I've been editing it a lot this last week, me and my excellent research assistant Mallory Pladus.

It's 55 000 words long, which makes it my shortest book by a long way.

We are going to try to put it out real fast. Every time I edit it gets a bit softer, more yin, less like a lecture. More readable.

I think I can put it through maybe five more edits in the intervening time.

Richard Grusin's collection of like minded thinkers on things that aren't human and how they have recently splattered unignorably all over the humanities is going to be a go to location for some time now.

Order it order it!

My one is called "They Are Here" and it is race and OOO. And Talking Heads. And yttrium oxide.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

The Buddhism book I wrote with Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn is online and you can order it. Proof reading it, we were struck by how nicely balanced our views are and how genuine and searching a discussion it is.

My MP3 recorder didn't work! So I have taken the unusual step of uploading the actual talk text. Let's see, to give you an idea of the atmosphere. There were about 200 people in the room. There was a long and lively Q&A. People laughed.

One question was about acts--why do I flatten them out so that they are indistinct, allegedly? To which I replied, it's quite the opposite, for me, acts are highly differentiated, and action is intrinsic to what an object is. Another question was about the dreaded narcissism--how to avoid it? I said don't avoid it, it's great! Just read Derrida on narcissism! What is required is that we extend narcissism to include more and more beings. Getting rid of it would destroy the relation to the other in advance. Another question was about the imminence of disaster--to which I responded that the disaster had already occurred, “we are already dead” etc. Another question was about people--are they singular or can they be groups or sets, collectives in other words?

Fantastic group of people on a fantastic day. There were many points of connection between my talk and others'. For instance, to name just a few: Kali Rubaii on dying-with (I invented that phrase in a chat afterwards but it really works to describe what she does); Jonathan Wald on orchids vs. corn (me: flowers vs stems); Emilie Dionne on the ethics of physical vulnerability and susceptibility; Joan Roughgarden on affiliations of humans and nonhumans; Hector Hoyos on individuals vs. people.

There's plenty of it. If you haven't been here, you have to sort of visualize a swarm of light, like a swarm of bees. It seems to nest in the branches of trees, as if slightly thick. But not tropical rich. Lemony golden. With a strange blue afterglow.

First thing you see when you drive over the Sierras: these light swarms.

"The basic point of mindfulness is to be completely, totally in touch with what happens in your body and the environment around you. You are not reduced to an inanimate clod of earth while you are meditating. You may feel your pulse or your heartbeat. You feel your breathing. You hear sounds and see sights. You feel vividly that you are alive." --Trungpa Rinpoche

That's it. I'm afraid, with full respect to David Lynch, I never could get behind transcendental meditation, which when you get over the fanciness of using a mantra, is basically replacing one thought with another. No wonder it's so soothing.

The TM approach implies there's something wrong with (that one) thought. That feeling of wrong just is samsara, precisely.

What's wrong with a thought--any thought? Just let it be naked. That's what I'm talkin about.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

The magnificent object-oriented feminism panels at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conferences are going into their fifth iteration this year thanks to Katherine. Always very good to be on them. Currently she is doing this.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

So next week I'm doing this philosophy lecture at Berkeley on OOO and ethics and politics. And I sat down and wrote 20 pages of it in like one hour. I'm so happy when that happens. It's sort of to do with gelling with the wishes of the group or person who invited you. That's what gets you to boiling point.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

So, I got these really nice readers' reports on Dark Ecology, my Wellek Lectures from last year (you can hear them on this blog if you go to Past Talks). It's very nice, because the readers were less acquainted with my work, and they really liked it.

I had always envisaged Ecology without Nature as the first book in a trilogy, and Dark Ecology is the third installment. Harvard published the first one and The Ecological Thought, and because Columbia publish the Welleks (for instance Derrida's Memoires for Paul De Man), they are doing Dark Ecology.

The best would be if Irigaray could endorse it, as she features large in the book. I discovered that my version of OOO basically made me an early 70s French feminist. Yippee! My favorite favorite class at Oxford was run by Stephanie Flood (hi Stephanie if you're still around!) as part of the student-run Oxford English Limited collective. We studied French feminism, in particular Marks and de Courtivron's anthology, which is due for a re-issue (take note presses!). And my very very favorite piece of writing of the time was not Marx or Derrida, but something by Chantal Chawaf from that anthology.

Finally I get to acknowledge that debt and slough off the last of the low-self-esteem peer-pressure intellectual affiliations...it's been coming but Dark Ecology is probably my most individuated. Finally I go up against (a certain form of) Marxism. Through the 90s I'd gradually seen I was more of a deconstructor than anything else, though I've always been a big Adorno fan and it's a line from him that is the epigraph of Dark Ecology. It didn't hurt that Derrida was like the first adult to really like my stuff.

Then I heard that my version of Derrida was OOO--madness! So if the shoe fits as they say...That's right, I'm The Weird One.

It's nice to discover what you think rather than impose your concept. It turns out I'm an anarchist who says about quasars and spoons what Irigaray says about the being she calls woman.

“Britain’s economic performance since the financial crisis struck has been startlingly bad. A tentative recovery began in 2009, but it stalled in 2010. Although growth resumed in 2013, real income per capita is only now reaching its level on the eve of the crisis — which means that Britain has had a much worse track record since 2007 than it had during the Great Depression.

“Yet as Britain prepares to go to the polls, the leaders of the coalition government that has ruled the country since 2010 are posing as the guardians of prosperity, the people who really know how to run the economy. And they are, by and large, getting away with it.” --Paul Krugman

Saturday, April 4, 2015

...I say these Chicago chaps know how to put a near perfect set of proofs together.

If you are publishing something with Zero books, proof read the **** out of it. I have hardly seen a book from them (apart from Graham's and he is a brilliant checker) that doesn't have an extraordinary range of errors. They become so hard to read because of that. Sure, they're cheap...

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci